Murder Dog Magazine caught up with one of Strange Music’s most popular in-house producers, Seven, to get just a little more information on what to expect from Tech N9ne’s upcoming project. From the new sound and direction they’re going in to what methods Seven and Tech still continue to use — finally, all you Strangers out there can have a better idea on what to get excited for.

On the new sound, Seven states:

When Kanye made 808’s and Heartbreaks everybody started copying that sound after that. I feel like this album could be like that, like changing Hip Hop for the time being. When we first started working on the album I sent Tech some beats. He said he had an idea. The first idea he had was the rocking chair idea. He wanted me to record a rocking chair sound and create the pattern off of that. When he said that, my mind just started clicking. Like a door knocking song we did—the drums are all made out of this knocking on the front door. I told Tech we should call the song ‘Stress’. I got all these stressful noises, like scraping against metal. Every 8 measures it starts building up stronger and stronger. It starts out real quiet and relaxing, and the sounds get harder and harder and louder and louder. It mimics the way you feel when you’re getting stressed out. Building and building almost to the point where you’re about to lose it. I don’t know if Tech’s gonna call it ‘Stress’ or not. He might totally change the concept, but that was the concept in my mind when I was creating the beats.

While reinvention is crucial to stay afloat in the music industry, the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rings true in this case. Seven talks about Tech’s evolution as an artist and still managing to capture what made his previous albums so successful:

I always tell Tech, ‘This album needs to be the debut album. Even if it’s the seventh album or the eighth album we need to treat it like the debut album.’ That means we have to forget everything we’ve ever done and start from the ground up and make something that’s never been done before. Everready would be an album that I feel like Tech grew up the most. When I listen to it, what I hear is the growth. It’s an album that sort of bridges together the younger Tech to the mature Tech. I think the album that we’re working on right now is the mature Everready. That’s the way I see it.

Finally, Seven states that even though this album will be a more mature version of previous works, it will still be completely different than anything he and Tech will have put out to date:

Every time that I start on a new Tech N9ne album I recreate the process. I start with new drum sounds. Everything is totally different. That’s basically my new template I use for producing until I make another Tech N9ne album. It’s my way of keeping things fresh. I don’t want to be one of those producers whose sound was hot for a period of time, but then it gets dated. I want to always recreate myself. The beauty of Strange Music is even if it took us 10 years to get here, now we can do anything that we wanna do and we have the same amount of fans as an artist on a major label. It took a really long time, but we don’t have any limitations. We can literally make anything we want and nobody is going to try to stop us. We do whatever we want. I wouldn’t wanna be part of any other scene than this.

Guess you’ll just have to purchase the album when it drops to find out what Tech’s new persona will be, but from what Seven is telling us, expect the unexpected.